Tag Archives: speakers

I’ve found myself with less time than usual for blogging lately as I’ve been busy working on the poster I’m presenting with colleagues at the upcoming ACRL National Conference. In the handful of years since I’ve been a librarian I’ve been to many smaller conferences and symposia in and around New York City (where I live), but this will be my first time attending the national conference, and as the date draws closer I find that I’m really looking forward to it.

In my past life as an archaeologist I went to lots of scholarly conferences, though I imagine that National will be somewhat different. While I enjoyed hearing about the latest research in my field back then, it always seemed odd to me that the convention was for presenters to stand at a podium and read straight through their scholarly papers. Of course some people are better at public speaking than others, and archaeologists tend to illustrate their talks with lots of site photos, charts, and graphs. But I find the very formal presentation style to be a bit monotonous, and I vastly prefer the more interactive and conversational style that most librarians seem to use at conferences.

Another big difference from my prior experiences is that the ACRL Conference has several keynote speakers, which is not the usual fare at other scholarly conferences I’ve been to. I find this a bit confusing: though I know that keynotes are a standard feature of both ALA conferences, it’s not what I expected to travel to an academic librarianship conference and hear speakers who are not involved in academic librarianship. I have to admit that I’m less interested in the keynote speakers than in other parts of the conference, though I’ll be curious to hear how they relate to academic libraries in their presentations.

Iâ€™m lucky to have many events at which I can connect with colleagues from my university and across NYC, but as a still-somewhat-new librarian I havenâ€™t had many opportunities to mingle with librarians from across the country. Iâ€™m most looking forward to the two things I remember fondly from the anthropology conferences I used to frequent (and I suspect this is true for many of us attending National):

1) the opportunity to share and discuss my and my colleagues’ work with others in our field, and

2) the opportunity to learn about research and practice in academic libraries from the other conference presenters and attendees

Conferences are a concentrated experience with no distractions — all academic librarianship all the time! — which I always find refreshing and invigorating (if sometimes exhausting). But I’ve got my reusable coffee cup, so I’m ready to go.